RECEPTION

Wow! What a fun-filled and action-packed week we have had! We had the BEST time at Eureka on Wednesday.We were submersed in sound and visual delights which supported our learning in understanding how sounds are made.We were all so well behaved on the trip and represented our school wonderfully! The staff at Eureka commented on the lovely manners, attitudes to learning and listening skills demonstrated by such young learners!

This week we have immersed ourselves in the glitz and glam of the seventies.We have been learning about the lives of Elton John, Diana Ross, ABBA and of course the legend that is David Bowie to name but a few. In English we have put our questioning skills to use and wrote questions to interview a rockstar.We thought of some wonderful, open ended questions to delve deeper into their

It has been a polar bear fact filled week this week! Year 2 have thoroughly enjoyed reflecting upon all of the amazing knowledge we gained from our trip to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park. The children have been creating their own polar bear fact files full of mind blowing facts around polar bears’ diets, habitats, appearance and adaptations. It has been wonderful to see all of the information the children have retained. We have been exploring how polar bears and other animals survive in the cold climates and carried out an experiment to help with our understanding. We learnt that animals which spend most of their time in the water have blubber and other animals such as polar bears have a thick layer of fat. We placed one hand in a bag which was covered in a layer of lard to represent a polar bear’s fat, left one hand uncovered and then placed both hands in a bowl of icy water! It was amazing to see how the lard acted as a barrier to the cold water whilst also keeping the heat from our hand inside the bag. You can try this experiment at home!

We have read the next instalment of our key text ‘Polar Bear Explorers’ Club’ and we have been delighted to learn that Stella will be going on her first expedition. We were introduced to the unique compasses in this book where the typical four points of North, South, East and West have been replaced with explorers’ needs and creatures they may encounter along the way such as food, shelter, water and angry gnomes! These special compasses can have up to twenty points! We used this concept in art to design our own compasses. We used our imaginations to draw different images for each compass point using our knowledge of what explorers may require and what you would like to come across on your expedition.

In maths, we have began looking at multiplication. The children have loved this week’s stimulus of… skittles! We have used these to group and make arrays using our two times tables.

Another busy week Year 2 but we are so proud of you for all of your fantastic learning. Where will Stella take us next week?

This week we have continued to explore the beautiful region of Patagonia in South America. We enjoyed learning about the fascinating king penguins that inhabit the islands of the Southern Ocean, and we used the famous illustrations of John Frederick Miller to inspire our own fabulous paintings of king penguins in brusho.